Nanomachines are one step closer

A single carbon nanotube molecule serves simultaneously as all essential components of a radio — antenna, tunable band-pass filter, amplifier, and demodulator,” said physicist Alex Zettl, who led the invention of the nanotube radio

Make way for the real nanopod

Watch out! I think this discover will play a very important role in bringing nanotech swarms a crucial step closer to reality.

Blogged with Flock

Tags: nanotech

KittenLulu.com gets a fresh web design

I grew tired of the Avon-style lady on my website. I shopped around for some nice wordpress template and found this nice, cute kitten begging to be bought.

I couldn’t resist.

Kitten. Got. Sim :)

Ethan Linden sent me an email when Second Life was down for maintenance. LindenLab just delivered my new sim.

Wow. They were fast this time, I made my order on April 12th… so it’s 13th, 14th, 15th, 16th, 17th… just 6 days!

The new sim is called Marche, like the Italian region where I live.

The global clash of emotions – Opinion – International Herald Tribune

The global clash of emotions – Opinion – International Herald Tribune

The Western world displays a culture of fear, the Arab and Muslim worlds are trapped in a culture of humiliation, and much of Asia displays a culture of hope.

Dominique Moïsi wrote quite an interesting  article in the International Herald Tribune, a sort of state-of-the-world summary.

[...] the Israeli-Palestinian conflict appears more than ever as a microcosm of what the world is becoming. Israel is the West, surrounded by the culture of humiliation and dreaming of escape from a dangerous region and of re-entry into a culture of hope. But it must find a solution to the Palestinian problem first, or else the escape will not be possible. So, too, Europe and America seek to permanently banish their fears but will be able to do so only by finding a way to help the Muslim world solve its problems.

Domestic violence – an all around phenomenon

‘Women in Quebec are more violent towards men – not the other way round’

What are the characteristics of this so-called ‘minor’ phenomenon of battered men?

For most people, the idea of battered men seems unbelievable. Nevertheless the reality is that men, too, are victims of domestic violence. The subject has been more widely tackled in the USA than in Europe, because over there male movements are better organised and more geared towards social themes. The topic also receives more media coverage. In a 2002 study lead by Denis Laroche for the Quebec National Statistics Institute, 62,700 women and 39, 500 men admitted to being victims of domestic violence (all types of violence).

Interesting article on a ‘taboo’ subject. Two thirds of the cases of domestic violence are perpetrated by men on women, while one third are done by women on men.

It’s not a limited phenomenon: unfortunately there aren’t complete statistics on domestic violence in EU, but based on related issues (criminal reports on the matter, etc.) it is believed that one in five women in Europe has been a victim.

New blog look

I am experimenting with a different wordpress template, I think the old one was too dark and the fonts were too small.

Kancept: post a product concept or vote others

Kancept is an interesting site, you can browse product concepts and product designs, vote for the best ones and hope that they will be noticed and built. Very lazyweb-style, something that her Royal Procrastinator Kitten Lulu, namely me, embraces totally…

Check it out, there are some quite cool potential products showcased on Kancept.

Worst EU Lobby Awards 2006

Europeans, please take a look and vote for the Worst EU Lobby Awards 2006.

This year, the candidates for The Worst EU Lobbying award are:

ExxonMobil
For continuing to fund climate change sceptics

Sky and Space Intergroup
For falling into a black hole of transparency

European Chemical Industry Council – (CEFIC)
For using scaremongering and misinformation

PR firm Weber Shandwick
For setting up a front group to advance the interests of pharmaceutical giant Roche while pretending to work for better access to cancer care.

David Earnshaw
For being a pharma industry lobbyist playing the “independent expert” at the European Parliament

The candidates for The Worst Privileged Access award are:

DG Internal Market
For manipulating a consultation on EU patent policies

Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson
Nominated for opening the doors wide for business lobbyists while leaving citizens, workers, consumers and Parliamentarians out in the rain.

The Austrian and Finnish EU Presidencies
For organising a meeting to provide the biotech industry with an exclusive golden opportunity to lobby decision-makers while keeping NGOs outside.

Commissioners Verheugen and Spidla
For hearing only the ‘corporate’ in corporate social responsibility

Enterprise and Industry Commissioner Verheugen
For installing unbalanced High Level Working Groups serving big business interests

For more informations, follow the link and read the detailed explaination of each entry.

Spreading the word…

I need to spread out the word about the new blog address, apart from Technorati and World of SL. Where should I look?

Time to move on…

Don’t worry, my friends, I am not planning to leave SecondLife but just to switch blogging platforms.

I have been using Blogger.com for more than a year, it was ideal for my original purpose: the mostly private photoblog of an obscure v-girl having fun in SecondLife.

Things have changed a lot lately. My SL business grew quite well and it’s time to invest a little bit of RL money to push it to another level. So here comes this new website and the dedicated server it runs on. The latter allows me to explore a lot of interesting ideas that I couldn’t reach with the old setup, due to CPU or bandwidth constraints.

In the process, I switched from Blogger.com to the more powerful and complete WordPress engine.